Carbon County by the numbers

While you're familiar with friends, family and acquaintances, how much do you know about the 21,000 other people in this county?

Would you believe that Carbon County is whiter, older and less college-educated than the rest of the state?

According to the numbers compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, that's the case. Our houses are cheaper, too.

Here are a few items from the 2010 Census and the 2011 estimates about our overall population.

We are slightly whiter than the state as a whole.

Carbonites are 95.3 percent white, as compared to 91.9 percent of Utahns in general. The difference is that our population has slightly fewer Blacks, Asians, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. White persons not Hispanic make up 84 percent of the population in Carbon, while the statewide proportion is 80.1 percent.

Time was when a huge percentage of our population came over from the "Old Country." Today only 3 percent of the county's people were born outside the United States. That is less than half of the statewide immigrant statistic of 8.2 percent.

We are also grayer.

A full 13.6 percent of the people here are over 65 years old. That's better than one person in eight. Statewide, the statistic is 9.4 percent, or less than one in 10.

Book learnin' is not our forte.

Among adults over 25 years old, the numbers show that in Carbon County only one person in eight - 12.8 percent - has a bachelor's degree or higher. The overall Utah figure is 29.6 percent. That's more than twice our college grad rate.

We are closer to the state achievement level in secondary school completion. Among Carbon's adults, 86.3 percent have a high school education, some college or an associate's degree. The Utah level is 90.6 percent.

Money isn't everything here.

Half the households in Carbon County earn less than $43,659. Statewide that median figure is $57,783. That evens out, though, because half of the houses here are valued at less than $117,200. Across the state, that median value is almost twice as high - $221,300.

More men are married than women?

Well, that's what happens to numbers sometimes when actual headcount gets adjusted by estimates. The 2007-2011 figures showed that 4,621 males over age 15 were married, and females 15 and over numbered 4,579.

About one person in 11 is of Italian descent.

There were 1,944 in that category, give or take a few, making Italian the third most common ancestry at 9.3 percent. The most common was English at 26.1 percent, followed by German at 14.3 percent. Portuguese and Subsaharan Africans are running neck-and-neck at less than 0.1 percent. Data show no Russians, Ukrainians or Arabs.

Veterans Day has meaning here.

Of the 15,000 or so civilians over 18 years old, about 1,500 are veterans. That's one in every ten post-adolescents.